


What's it like?

by TiffanyF



Series: Building a family [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Discussions of mpreg, Just family time, M/M, nothing graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 08:17:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1170787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiffanyF/pseuds/TiffanyF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rory asks his partner what it's like to carry a child. The Doctor doesn't exactly tell him, but some of the Doctor's past comes out in the conversation. Not cannon, not cannon compliant, crack, and all that usual stuff for my writing. I don't own, claim, or make money from this. Sarah Rose is my creation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's it like?

**Author's Note:**

> I've moved to a new city and state and have been without internet/driving/packing/unpacking for a little over a month and this is the first thing I've written in that time. It's amazing how creativity goes away when one is exhausted every night.
> 
> Please enjoy.

“What’s it feel like?” Rory asked. He and the Doctor were lying with their daughter on a blanket between them at the pool. The six month old girl, Sarah Rose, was asleep after a swim and the lovers were taking a chance to just enjoy the other’s company.

“What does what feel like?” the Doctor asked, rolling his head so he could see the other man better.

“Carrying a child,” Rory replied. “You know how much I’ve always wanted children, I’ve asked a lot of women what it feels like, feeling the new life growing inside them, but no one has ever been able to tell me anything beyond magical. I was just wondering if you felt the same thing human women do.”

The Doctor smiled fondly. “It’s a life-changing experience, Rory, and one that is pretty individual,” he said. “My late wife carried our first two children, both boys, and then she contracted an illness specific to my people, it’s what killed her in the end, so she wasn’t able to have any more children. I had the other four, two girls and two boys, the last set twins, actually. I was being quite serious when I said that Sarah Rose isn’t my first child.”

“I didn’t know you had been married before,” Rory said, sitting up. “What was she like?”

“Quiet, sweet, loving,” the Doctor said. “Old girl, pull up the old family pictures for me, please. I know, but Rory is here and he needs to know about my past, or as much of it as I can tell him before Sarah Rose wakes up. There, that’s my wife. That’s our wedding day, Rory, with her parents behind her and mine behind me. I think her death is what led me to want to travel, to find out more about the universe, about time and space. I studied at the Academy until just after her death and then off I went. Not in the TARDIS, not that time, but I traveled a little until something happened and I had to go home again.”

“What happened?” Rory asked.

“One of my daughters died giving birth to her first child, Susan,” the Doctor replied. “There, that’s the children. I’d forgotten I had that picture of all of them. One boy went to the Academy and stayed to teach after he finished. The other three went into the military to help defend Gallifrey, and time and space, too. The girls married and stayed home to raise their own families. I took Susan and raised her as best I could on my own. I’d done it before, I would have been able to do it again.”

Rory leaned over and kissed the Doctor softly. “There is nowhere else I would rather be,” he said. “I miss Amy, and I hate how much she was hurt by what happened, but you are my family, Doctor. You and Sarah Rose. What happened with Susan?”

“Oh, we took the TARDIS and went off exploring together,” the Doctor said with a small smile. “She inherited my love of travel and seeing new places, but I wasn’t the man I am now. I wasn’t a good grandfather to her, but when she fell in love, I could see it and I told her to follow her heart. I never saw her again. I don’t know what happened to her, if she was on Gallifrey when it was destroyed during the War or not.”

 

“Some of your family was though.”

“All of it. I’ve told you what happened that day, Rory, what I had to do,” the Doctor said. “I’m not proud of it, I would never have told you if not for the bond we share now. I lost more than just my people that day. I lost everything.”

“There’s no way to get it back?”

“Time lock, it’s sealed away, never to be accessed again,” the Doctor said with a small sigh. “There we are, that’s Susan there. She’s the only one that ever took a human name. I still can’t bring myself to break tradition on that one, Rory.”

“You don’t have to, I understand,” Rory said. “Did the kids you carried know that your wife wasn’t their other parent?”

“They figured it out, in the end. My wife, when they worked it out, sat them down and explained everything to them. About how it wasn’t cheating when she asked me to do it, so we could have the large family she’d always wanted. There wasn’t any stigma to being carried by your father, as long as it was wanted by everyone, and they eventually met their other father as well. He was a good man.”

“He must have been a close friend of yours to father four children with you.”

“He was, from the Academy. We met in a temporal class and became study partners,” the Doctor said. “If not for me already being married, I think he and I might have bonded. When I asked him if he would father the children, he was so happy, Rory. I don’t know how he was able to watch from a distance while my wife raised them, but he did. The twins came from his family, I think. They were a surprise because neither my wife nor I had twins in our family before, and it’s rare for them to just show up in our people.”

“I wouldn’t be able to watch, Doctor,” Rory said. “Not with my children. I want to be involved in every part of their lives. I don’t want Sarah Rose to grow up too fast, but I’m looking forward to your next pregnancy. I want to be here for all of it this time around.”

The Doctor smiled softly. “It’s not exactly like a human woman’s, Rory,” he said. “I won’t have as much weight gain. There’s some, you can’t avoid it, but there’s something about Time Lord physiology that comes into play and the development is different to keep from crushing organs that aren’t meant to be crushed.”

“Doctor, are you trying to tell me that your uterus is in another pocket of time and space?” Rory asked.

“Something along those lines, yes, but not exactly,” the Doctor replied. “You’ll just have to see what happens when we have our next one in a year and a half or so. Sarah Rose should stop nursing within the next eighteen months. My people go on solids earlier than human babies do.”

“The thought of more children, of having a large family, I know exactly what your wife meant,” Rory said, smiling down at his daughter. “I was an only child, Doctor, and it’s lonely growing up without others to play with. Making friends is hard when you’re an awkward child whose father is considered odd. Amy was one of the few that accepted me, and you know what a rough childhood she had.”

“Not aided by my dropping in like I did,” the Doctor said with a sigh. “I wish there was a way we could ease her pain, Rory, I really do. It’s always hard for me to lose my companions, the only family I had for so many years, but to have one of them end up hating me, it breaks my hearts.”

“I know, Doctor, I know, but time is the only way to heal from something like this, and even then, she may never forgive us for what happened,” Rory said. “We didn’t have sex when she and I were traveling with you, but we did sleep together, and that’s a pretty big betrayal. I know, it was when she kicked me out hoping I’d find someone that could have children and be happy with them, but going back and then leaving, that did a lot of damage.”

The Doctor looked down at Sarah Rose. “Humans are illogical at the worst times, Rory,” he finally said. 

“Logic doesn’t exactly rule the heart, Doctor,” Rory said. “Oops, I think she’s waking up.”

“Probably hungry, too,” the Doctor said, sitting up. “Hello there, Sarah Rose, did you have a good nap? You did, that’s good. Hungry?”

Rory watched the Doctor get the baby settled. “I’m not brave enough to try and carry one, Doctor,” he admitted. “I don’t know how I would handle it.”

“You don’t have to, Rory,” the Doctor said. “I enjoy carrying children, it’s no problem at all, and two years between is a good spacing. I think my people have the right of it there, two years or longer between children.”

“Unless there’s twins, or more,” Rory said.

“True, and those twins were a shock when I found out,” the Doctor said. “My friend had died in a traffic accident not long after fathering them, so he never knew about the twins, and there was no way for me to ask him if twins ran in his family or not.”

Rory shook his head with a wry look. “You tell people you’re 1,200 years old, but there are times when I realize exactly what that means,” he said. “You’ve lived so many lives, Doctor, through so many different things that I’m amazed you remember as much as you do.”

“I have old time logs around here somewhere, and I kept a 500 year diary a few times,” the Doctor said. “I can dig them up if you’re curious, Rory.”

“I want to know as much about you as possible,” Rory said. He moved over and rested a hand by the Doctor’s far hip, hooking his chin over the Doctor’s shoulder. “Especially as you know everything about me already.”

“You’ll be able to add to your experiences as you age and regenerate,” the Doctor said. “The most important thing to remember, Rory, is that the base of you stays the same, but you do change. We will love each other no matter which body we’re in, but we’ll have to relearn the other each time.”

“So the love in the heart won’t change with regeneration?”

“No, and a full-blood Time Lord can live for several hundred years in the same body before regenerating,” the Doctor said. He shifted Sarah Rose and looked over towards Rory. “It’s age, illness, or severe injury that causes regeneration. I’ve been in this form for about a hundred years, I think, so we have a while, and your first regeneration will likely be triggered by mine just because of how you became half-Time Lord like you did.”

“As long as we can be together and love our family, Doctor, I’m not worried about it,” Rory said. “I think that I’ll make an attempt to cook supper for us tonight. How does that sound?”

“Good, as long as you don’t put bacon in it again.”

“I won’t, I learned my lesson on that one,” Rory sighed.

The Doctor pulled Rory around for a kiss. “Our hearts will never change, Rory,” he said. “The outside will, yes, but the inside will be the same. I promise you.”

“That’s all I need to know,” Rory said.


End file.
